Hippo Problem

Highest Paid Person's Opinion: the tendency to defer to the most senior person in the room, regardless of data. Avinash Kaushik named it in 2006 while watching web analytics teams build dashboards, run A/B tests, collect statistically significant evidence — and then watch the VP walk in and say "I think we should go with the blue button." The data said red converted 23% better. The room went with blue. Not because anyone was persuaded. Because disagreeing with the VP's gut carried more career risk than shipping a worse product.

Amazon's "disagree and commit" was designed to fight this. The best idea wins, not the loudest title. Bezos insisted on an "empty chair" for the customer in every meeting — a physical reminder that the highest-paid person in the room was not the most important voice. Data-driven culture requires explicit structures to override hierarchy. Without them, hierarchy wins every time.

The Hippo Problem kills innovation. Junior people with better ideas stay silent. The antidote: anonymize opinions, weight by expertise (Bridgewater's believability weighting), separate idea generation from evaluation. When idea generation and evaluation happen in the same meeting, the first voice anchors the room. Running them in separate sessions — brainstorm first, critique later, with different facilitation — breaks the anchor. Believability weighting replaces title with track record: a junior analyst with a strong record on interest rate calls carries more weight on an interest rate decision than a senior portfolio manager with a weak one. The mechanism removes the Hippo as a category.

The mechanism is a triple lock. Authority bias: humans instinctively defer to perceived authority. Conformity: once the highest-status person states a position, each subsequent speaker calibrates to the visible "consensus." Career risk: the analyst who contradicts the SVP is evaluated on whether they were "a team player," not whether they were right. The incentive structure punishes the exact behaviour that good decisions require.

The scale of the problem is proportional to the organization's investment in data. A company that spends millions on analytics and then overrides the output because the CMO has a different instinct is paying for a decision-making system it doesn't use. The data infrastructure becomes organizational furniture: expensive, in the room, and nobody sits on it when the Hippo is standing.

The Hippo problem is not rare. It is the default. In any meeting where hierarchy exists, the highest-status person's opinion carries disproportionate weight — not because it is better, but because the social physics of the room amplify it. Amazon's six-page memo, read in silence at the start of every meeting, forces every person in the room to form an independent judgment before anyone speaks. The Hippo's power comes from speaking first and anchoring the room. Silent reading eliminates the anchor.